


Ways To Disappear

by fallintolife



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Gratuitous world-building, Music as a coping mechanism, Self-Insert, Tags updated as story progresses
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:35:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 10,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22019494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallintolife/pseuds/fallintolife
Summary: At first, Takushi thought this would be just like their first life, only in Japan.Meeting Uzumaki Mito quickly put an end to that line of thought.
Comments: 44
Kudos: 229





	1. defining the self

**Author's Note:**

> Credit to those who have inspired me, including Dreaming Of Sunshine, and Hear The Silence ([link](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15406896)).
> 
> Expect the tags to update as the work does, and for things to get very bad before they get better. They _will_ get better.

Uzumaki Mito holds court in a sitting room decorated in ocean colors, with herself in a supremely comfortable seat, sipping from a teacup shaped like a koi. The teacup curls around her fingers in a perfect riot of color, energy channeled exactly as she bade it. 

Scattered around the room, unseen but not unfelt, are the Senju who have dedicated themselves to her protection. Mito’s eldest son spread his seed far and wide, and though few of her grandchildren bear the Senju name, they all inherited their father’s fierce love for her. As more and more of them come of age, they also come into the habit of draping themselves over Mito’s house like hunting cats, pointedly relaxed but perpetually ready to spring into action.

Senju Akari approaches Mito’s throne, leading her child by the hand. Mito smiles like the grandmother she is, and beckons them both closer.

Akari is a harried woman, the eighth daughter of a minor Clan Head, who caught the attention of Mito’s nephew before Akari quite understood what marrying him would bring about for her. She has steadily acquired more and more grey to replace the black in her hair, and is - so far - the last of her generation of the family to bear a child.

“Is this your daughter?” Mito asks, looking down at the child.

The child looks little like the mother, Senju genes speaking loudly in heterochromatic green/blue eyes and a shock of blue hair unlike any other Senju (and thus, clearly fitting into a family that rarely looks anything alike). The mismatched eyes gaze up at Mito, scrunched up and far too serious for such an age.

Before Akari can say a single word, the child speaks: “No.”

“No?” Mito tilts her head, seeming curious rather than offended. She takes the interruption in stride, eyes moving from mother to child. “Son, then?”

The child thinks for a moment, clearly turning this over. After a moment: “Yes.”

“What is your name, son of Akari?” She speaks with infinite patience, and all the indulgence of a woman to her great-nephew.

The child makes a play of thinking for a moment, though it’s clear to everyone in the room that this name was decided long ago.

“Takushi,” the child says. “Senju Takushi.”

Mito nods. “Would you like to be a shinobi when you grow up, Takushi-chan?”

“No.”

Throughout the conversation between the Senju Clan Head and her great-nephew, Akari’s face has been growing steadily more and more horrified. When the child says ‘no’, Akari steps forward, lips already forming an apology. 

Mito holds up one hand without looking away from the child. She waits, letting her grand-nephew think.

The words come in ones and twos, carefully enunciated and curled around the edges. “I don’t wanna be a shinobi. But I don’t wanna die.”

“The Senju and Uzumaki have many places for those who aren’t shinobi,” Mito says.

The child’s head shakes from side to side. “Gonna be a shinobi. A good one.”

“Yes,” Mito says thoughtfully, “I think that you will be.” She turns to her niece-in-law, taking a drink from her cup. “When he turns twelve, bring him back to me.”

“Of course, Mito-sama,” Akari says, just about tripping over herself to head towards the door. When Mito gives her a look that suggests a long-held argument, Akari corrects herself, “Mito-oba-san.”

She sweeps Takushi up and into her arms as soon as they are out of the room, and she gives him a look suggesting she doesn’t know whether to praise or punish.

“Gonna be a good shinobi,” he says solemnly, before resting his head on her shoulder and closing his eyes.

Akari laughs helplessly, and takes him home.


	2. defining the role

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for strongly-implied dysmorphia, dissociation, and thoughts of past misgendering

In a ninja village, gossip flies at the speed of light.

If you’ve made no effort to hide something, expect that absolutely everyone will know and act as though you publicly proclaimed it. If you _have_ tried to hide it, expect instead that several people will know, but will politely pretend they don’t.

Senju Takushi learns this truth at a very young age.

“Your son is so handsome!” Exclaims one of his mother’s friends, ruffling his hair. “He’s going to be a heart-breaker when he grows up.”

Takushi tolerates the touch without even giving his mother a long-suffering look. He’s feeling indulgent; he thought that this life would be a repeat of the last, where he spent his entire life drilling into people’s heads that he was _not_ a girl, and did not appreciate being called one. Here, all he had to do was tell Uzumaki Mito that he was a boy, and that was taken as law.

(He is not, under any circumstances, ready to address the fact that he was living a story from his past life, let alone that he seems to be in one of the poorly-documented times of that story. Being a ninja will give him enough anxiety by itself, thanks.)

He sits calmly in an oasis of middle-aged women, patted and fussed over. He’s related to most of them, by genetics or marriage or the oceans of blood spilled together that bind ninja tighter than either of those. 

It’s easy to slip into his own thoughts as a child, so long as he keeps his hands busy on one thing or another. No one questions that he’s staring more than playing, or that he always seems startled when someone addresses him by name.

No one calls him by the name on his birth certificate. He would be unsurprised if someone quietly updated it some time in the next few years. It’s so much better than his last life that he can almost forgive that they’ll be expecting him to kill before he hits puberty.

Almost.

“Ready for a nap, Takushi-chan?”

Takushi blinks. At some point, everyone left except his mother. His situational awareness is absolutely shot, and he forcefully lets that thought go. He is in the body of a child. Trying to push it to the capabilities of an adult will just drive him crazy, and that’s assuming he doesn’t hurt himself doing it.

His mother picks him up, and carries him to his room. He is not, in fact, ready for a nap, but he can feel his body gearing down for it. Like so many other things, it is unpleasant but necessary, and he obligingly closes his eyes.

Senju Takushi hums himself to sleep, careful not to push his voice too hard or too far.

[*]

They test him for an elemental affinity _much_ earlier than he expected. He doesn’t actually know how they do it, considering he has no idea how to channel chakra. But when the Senju medics declare his affinity to be wind, he’s willing to take their word for it.

“It could change,” the medic says brusquely, “but if it does, it’s most likely to change to fire.”

Akari sighs, shoulders slumping. “Thank you.”

They leave the hospital, and Takushi frowns the entire way back. What’s wrong with wind? It’s weird, sure, but it’s not like he got water, which is a pain to train in Konoha. Even if he had, his (deceased) great-uncle Tobirama surely left some scrolls behind. Wind, at least, Takushi knows more than one of his relatives has.

It’s much later when he overhears snippets of a conversation between his mother and one of his vaguely-related “aunties” that he understands.

“Another with no chance of wood,” his aunt frets. “They’re beginning to think no one after Hashirama will have it.”

Whatever his mother says, Takushi can’t hear it through the wall. He does hear her sigh, and his aunt says something consoling.

Takushi turns over in his child-sized bed and hums himself to sleep, voice a little stronger than before.

[*]

If you had asked Senju Akari about her son before the age of five, she would have said that he was a joy to raise. Easy-going and intelligent, prone to thoughtful silences and constantly requiring more advanced toys to keep him occupied. There were two incidents, she would reluctantly admit.

Once, when he was very small, he suddenly let out a scream so loud and distressed that ANBU reached him before Akari did, even though she was in the next room. He immediately burst into wailing tears, the kind that Akari hadn’t known he could make.

The ANBU had looked to her helplessly, watching as Akari tried to figure out what was wrong with her son. He didn’t respond to her questions, and later the medics declared him physically fine, so she held him and rocked him, until he finally fell asleep in her arms.

The next day, he seemed to have no idea what she was talking about, and she reluctantly let it go.

The second incident was The Uzumaki Mito Affair, and the less said about that, the better.

Then he reached the age of five, and she found that her son was a prodigy in none of the ways a ninja village valued.

[*]

Takushi has been humming himself to sleep for a long time. His return to awareness has been punctuated with songs half-remembered from another life, carefully done with his childish voice. He thought that, with his future as a ninja, it would be only an indulgence, something to keep himself sane with memories of another time.

Then his mother brings him a flute.

It’s a battered little thing, probably living in some field ninja’s vest before being gifted to him, but it’s also more than just a flute. It’s hope. Hope that maybe, somewhere in the life that would be full of violence and blood, he would be able to preserve music in himself.

He puts the flute to his lips, training his clumsy body in how to hold an instrument. He hadn’t practiced much with wind instruments in his last life, but he knows pitch, and adjusts his grip and technique until things sound the way they should.

When he looks up from his playing - just a simple song from his last life, something he would have taught a grade-schooler - it’s to his mother staring at him.

“Has one of your aunties been teaching you?” Akari asks, a mixture of pride and fear in her voice.

Takushi tilts his head. He had decided from the beginning not to hide his maturity. Konoha was the village of child geniuses, and he had been born into one of the noble clans. Rather than distress himself hiding most of who he was, he had decided to only hide that he was from another world.

So while he likely could get away with lying and saying he’d been taught, and that he didn’t remember by who, he instead chooses to shake his head.

(After all, while sound could be weaponized, this wasn’t the kind of aptitude that got him a hitai-ate at a tender age. He had no great desire to be one of the prodigies who saw a battlefield before they saw their eighth birthday, no thank you.)

“Play it again, Takushi-chan,” his mother says, sitting next to him on the floor.

Takushi raises the flute to his lips, and plays.


	3. first steps on the path

“Show us what you learned today, Takushi-chan.”

Takushi obligingly pulls his flute out from a pocket, takes a seat, and plays for his aunties.

He chooses to look at it as a business transaction. Food, shelter, clothes, a basic education— his mother agreed to give him all those by birthing him. Arranging for his music lessons was above and beyond anything he’d expected, and so he performs whenever his mother asks, for whoever she wants to show off for. He gets skills, she gets to Win At Parenting. He considers it fair.

“Oh, that’s lovely!” Exclaims one of his aunties when he’s finished. They all clap, faces ranging from mildly indulgent to genuinely excited. His mother sits at the center of them, equal parts proud and smug.

When they finish, he transitions into another song, and a third before the night is over. They clap for him, and pat his hair, and tell him how wonderful he sounds. And if he suspects that his skills would be more welcome with a girl-child than a boy-child, well. Not one of them is so cruel as to voice that thought.

[*]

Takushi suspects that the old saying about children hearing and seeing more than you think is true. He certainly overhears a lot more than he ever thought he would as a child. 

Sometimes this is awkward, such as when he understands the subtext of a conversation between his mother and her cousin, in which he’s fairly certain the cousin is sleeping with eight (maybe nine?) women at once, and none of them have caught on to the other. His mother and cousin use metaphor, but he’s not actually five, and his grasp of the language is good enough that he understands exactly what they’re saying.

Other times, it’s useful. Such as when he wakes at dawn to the sound of his mother’s door opening, and instead of rolling over and ignoring it, he chooses to follow her out into the house.

As he watches, Akari pulls out a mat, steps onto it, and begins a series of steps that are familiar in intent if not in their entirety. It’s not the yoga he remembers from his last life, but it’s something akin to it.

Takushi pulls out the second mat - his father’s? - and does his best to follow his mother’s lead. She slows down without a word, and they move until the sun has properly entered their sitting room.

At the end, his mother rolls up both mats, and Takushi hauls his exhausted body back into bed. He wakes to the smell of breakfast, and they eat without exchanging a word.

The next morning, and every morning after that for many years, he rises with her, and they move with the dawn.

[*]

For his sixth birthday, he’s greeted by a variety of unsubtly-wrapped packages. Opening them one by one, he unwraps a multitude of instruments sized for tiny hands. When he looks up from the bounty, every single one of his army of aunties is beaming.

“Well, Takushi-chan?” Akari asks, a hesitant smile on her face.

He bursts into tears for the first time since he was very small and first realized what he’d lost in coming here.

His mother draws him in close, and he allows it, crying out his overwhelming feelings until he’s just down to sniffles.

“Thank you,” he mumbles, one hand rubbing tears out of his eyes.

A legion of smiles responds, and for the first time he thinks he might not mind being a Senju.

[*]

He starts putting effort into learning names. Takushi hadn’t cared to get close to any of his relatives before, but they had _paid attention_ to his interests and were working to _enable_ them, and that’s more than he could say for half the people in his life before this one.

There’s Kiyumi, the tiny one who looks to be the youngest, Yuriko, with rough hands but friendly eyes, Wakana, constantly giggling and with her eye makeup always impeccable, Ichino, who looks disapproving at all times but still shows up for every occasion, and those are just the main aunties.

Takushi is no good at telling ages - especially not with women who are either kunoichi or have lived with ninja all their lives - but he thinks the average age is early thirties. Untangling how exactly he’s related to any given woman is beyond both his ability and his patience, but he gathers that most of them are Senju, Yamanaka, or have married into one of the two.

While he’s actually listening to them, as opposed to dissociating so hard he’s astral projecting, he picks up that there are some tensions on the border, and the majority of his aunties’ husbands and brothers are stationed out there.

“Renzo better come back,” Ichino grouches, taking a delicate sip of her tea. “I’m not raising his son by myself.”

The other aunties make all the appropriate sympathetic noises, Kiyumi laying her hand on Ichino’s arm.

“When will Takushi-chan enter the Academy?” Asks Yuriko, turning curious eyes on the boy.

“This fall,” Akari says. “I wanted to give him time to adjust.”

Takushi drops his blocks.

No one seems to notice, and he stares out into nothingness as he processes.

It’s not that it’s _soon_ , exactly. He’s aware that most clan children enter the Academy at five, and that he’s the odd one out starting late. It’s that he somehow, despite being constantly aware of what Konoha expected of him, forgot that being a ninja requires work put into it. More than exercising in the mornings with his mother, and the scattered tutors he’s had, he’ll need an education. In murder.

His aunties move on to discussing the latest village gossip, but Takushi misses almost all of it.

Ninja school. In just a few short weeks, he’ll be going to ninja school. God help him, his mother, his aunties, and every single instructor at that school, because none of them fully understand what’s about to happen.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for misgendering, and discussion of ritual suicide.

Senju Takushi expected a lot of things out of the Academy, but he hadn’t expected this.

_This_ being his chuunin-sensei staring at him, as if trying to drill answers out of a six year-old by the sheer force of his glare.

Takushi resists the urge to ask if there’s something on his face. He doesn’t want to start off his Academy career by being a snarky little asshole to people who can - and probably will - poison him. They’d never get away with killing or even seriously harming a Senju, but they can make him very miserable for basically as long as they see fit.

Besides, the chuunin could just be trying to put a face to a name. Takushi is the second-youngest Senju of his generation, and all the others are highly social in their own ways. Maybe he just doesn’t recognize Takushi; the chuunin does look as though he could be a Yamanaka—

“Senju Akari has a daughter, not a son.”

—Takushi feels his face close down, eyes going shuttered. There he is trying to be optimistic, and some fucking chuunin-sensei shoots his faith in humanity in the ass.

“I’m a boy.”

For one brief, shining moment, there is a possibility of this being a problem for another day. All the chuunin-sensei has to do is let it go and go back to roll call. He doesn’t even need to look convinced. Takushi isn’t interested in starting a fight with someone twice his height and three times his weight. But the chuunin-sensei just stares and stares, looking increasingly disbelieving, and well. That’s torn it.

“Do you always need a six year-old to tell you when you’re wrong?” Takushi wonders out loud. “Or are you wrong so much that even little kids can see it?”

Like the bloodthirsty little sharks-in-training that Academy students are, the class hones in on the chuunin-sensei, who begins turning a disgusting shade of red. They’re a breath away from starting the little kid hooting and hollering that Takushi remembers from his past life, and if they were civilians he’s pretty sure they’d already be heckling the teenager in front of them.

“You little bitch—”

Before the chuunin-sensei can say something that will get his career ruined, Takushi hops down off his chair, heading towards the door. The chuunin calls after him, and Takushi ignores him. He does not have to stay here. Even his last life considered this harassment, and he hadn’t had the backing of an entire noble clan then.

There’s a feeling that Takushi can only describe as a _flex_ in the air, and then the chuunin-sensei is standing in front of him, already reaching out.

“If you touch me,” Takushi says, low enough that the kids behind him can’t hear, “my Clan Head will see you hung.”

He doesn’t know if that’s true or not, but his aunties have been teaching him how to speak with authority, and it gives the chuunin-sensei enough pause that Takushi slips past him and out of the classroom.

Once out of the Academy building, Takushi heads straight back to the Clan Senju compound. He knows his mother is at the onsen, but at least one of his aunties will be around. The first door he knocks on opens, and Takushi cranes his head upward.

Senju Ichino looks disapproving at all times, but she shows affection through her actions; she’s been at every family occasion and birthday, and he thinks it’s her who’s been slipping him extra apple slices at snack time. He suspects she was a kunoichi before she gave birth, and he also thinks she’s less ‘retired’ than everyone is politely pretending she is.

When she opens the door, she rakes her eyes up and down him, scanning for who-knows-what. Then: “Yes, Takushi-chan?”

“Chuunin-sensei said I was a girl,” Takushi says bluntly.

Something dangerous sparks in Ichino’s eyes, quickly hidden. “Did you tell him you weren’t?”

“Yeah,” Takushi says. “He didn’t listen.”

Ichino crouches down, sweeping Takushi up into her arms. Normally Takushi only tolerates being held, but there’s a cold satisfaction in knowing that from here on out, Ichino will be _handling it_. He was ready to accept a lot of things from the Academy: borderline-abuse disguised as training, indoctrination into Konoha’s military, hazing equal to his peers. But there’s one line he’s going to keep drawing in the sand: he will _not_ be misgendered by Konoha-nin who have had the opportunity to learn better.

She marches back to the Academy, ninja and civilians alike getting out of her way. He can only imagine what her face looks like right now, and he appreciates that she was ready to go to bat for him as soon as he asked.

Someone tries to stop her at the door, only to rear back as if physically struck when she gives him a withering look. Ichino stalks through the halls to an office Takushi had planned not to enter for a long time, and walks in without knocking.

“Senju-san?”

The woman behind the desk is an older kunoichi, one with scars on every inch of her exposed arms, and a slight limp when he’d seen her at the opening ceremony. He thinks she was a front-line fighter, benched when she got that limp and given oversight of the Academy when it turned out she was good at administration.

“Explain to me why my nephew was incorrectly addressed by his chuunin-sensei, even after correcting him.” Ichino’s tone is deadly-cold, and she stares holes into the Academy Head.

The Academy Head is too skilled - and/or Takushi isn’t skilled enough - for him to see anything on her face. She inclines her head to Ichino, and calls out to her secretary, “Yuuhi. Find the sensei for Class Five and tell him he’s late to a meeting with me.”

There’s a muffled affirmative from the other room, and another _flex_ that Takushi now figures is _shunshin_ or something similar.

A few minutes pass. Ichino neither sits nor makes any motion to put Takushi down. The Academy Head doesn’t offer her a seat. When reality flexes again, it spits out the idiot chuunin-sensei.

The chuunin’s eyes flick from Ichino, to the Academy Head, to Takushi, then back to Ichino. He promptly flows down into seiza, taking a scroll, a vial of ink, and a brush out of his pockets. For a long moment, no one says anything, as the chuunin begins to write.

“Auntie,” Takushi frowns, “what is he doing?”

“He’s composing his death poem,” the Academy Head answers. Takushi’s eyes widen, and for a horrified moment, he wonders if the chuunin-sensei is going to have to commit suicide right here and now, because he misgendered a minor clansman. Then the Academy Head snaps, “Get up.”

A fine tremor runs through the chuunin, but he recaps the ink vial with smooth motions, putting it, the scroll, and then the brush away.

“While I’m pleased to see that you pay attention to the history you teach,” the Academy Head says dryly, “I’d hope you’d noted that it was _ancient_ history. If Senju-san wanted your head, I suspect she would have filed a formal complaint.”

Ichino doesn’t contradict her, which is as good as agreeing.

The Academy Head studies the chuunin in front of her, who hasn’t stopped trembling since he stood up.

“You are suspended for the semester,” the Academy Head says. “I will be teaching your class for the duration.” The chuunin-sensei sags against the wall with visible relief, and the Head turns to look at Ichino. “Takushi-chan will be placed in a different class starting tomorrow, with my personal guarantee that none of the staff will address him incorrectly ever again. Is this acceptable, Senju-san?”

Ichino inclines her head. “It is.”

“Then please excuse us, Senju-san,” the Academy Head requests. “It seems my subordinate requires a reminder on how we treat students.”

Ichino sweeps out of the office without another word, but her strides aren’t quick enough that Takushi misses the deadly serious tone that comes out of the Head’s office almost immediately. Good.

When Ichino has him sitting at her kitchen table, cutting apple slices with a deftness that speaks of experience, Takushi finally asks the question that’s been on his mind:

“Was he really gonna kill himself?”

Ichino finishes slicing the apple without a pause, plating them and putting the plate in front of him. She regards Takushi with a steady gaze.

“He might have,” she says, “but it would not have been right to make him.”

Takushi nods. “I know.”

“And,” Ichino says, “our Clan Head would have been very upset with us.”

Takushi takes a bite of an apple slice, thinking that over. “Why?”

“Mito-sama believes that killing non-clansmen over minor slights is a waste of life.” It’s impossible for Takushi to tell if Ichino disapproves of this, or if that’s just her face. “I agree.” Just her face, then.

When Akari returns from the onsen, Ichino explains things to her in a crisp, no-nonsense tone. Akari rests her hand on her son’s head.

“I’m proud of you,” she says.

No one says another word about it.

[*]

The next day during lunch, one of the students turns in her seat and asks Takushi, “Why weren’t you here yesterday?”

The new chuunin-sensei doesn’t look up from his book, but Takushi knows he’s listening.

“I was sick,” Takushi lies easily.

That gets him reactions ranging from disgust to disgust mixed with fascination, and a group of children who have probably never been sick bombard him with questions about it.

Later, the chuunin-sensei rests a hand on his shoulder with a significant look. It’s only the first of many times Takushi tacitly agrees to keep Konoha’s secrets.


	5. an education is a terrible thing to waste

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for referenced institutionalization. Song mentioned in this chapter: [Institutionalized, by Suicidal Tendencies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE4Fvjhz2sE).

After the first two weeks, Takushi resigns himself to a slow death by boredom.

The history classes are a more edited version of what he’s already learned from his tutors. The ‘taijutsu’ classes are just conditioning and stretches he’s been doing with his mother for over a year. Math has never been a strong point, but he’s been doing basic arithmetic for almost thirty years of combined time now. It’s impossible to get any actual meditation done in the meditation class because only he and the Hyuuga kid are capable of sitting still. And worst of all, he’s only allowed to do his music classes on Saturdays now.

He wonders, with about ten percent seriousness, if reincarnating again would land him as an unsupervised orphan.

Two Mondays after he got a chuunin-sensei suspended for being an asshole, his mother takes him to school. Takushi tilts his head at her but doesn’t ask questions; he usually just follows his gaggle of cousins to the Academy, then heads home when they do. His mother only took him to school the first time, and she left after the Opening Ceremony.

She takes him directly to the Academy Head’s office, and he reflects that he has now been the Academy Head’s office more times in this life than he went to the principal’s office in his last life. _And_ he was more of a trouble-maker then.

Both the Academy Head and his new chuunin-sensei are there. The latter smiles reassuringly when they enter, which puts Takushi a little at ease. Intellectually he knows that a ninja’s job is lying, stealing, and killing, but the chuunin-sensei has never lied to him (that he’s aware of).

“We feel your son isn’t being adequately challenged,” the Academy Head says, “and we would like to give him a handful of tests, with an eye towards early graduation.”

Takushi immediately frowns, relieved to note his mother doesn’t seem enthusiastic either.

“Only two or three years early,” the Head assures Akari. “It would be possible to push him to graduate earlier, but no reason to do so in peacetime.”

Akari turns to Takushi. “How would you feel about becoming a genin at ten, Takushi-chan?”

Takushi nods. “That’s fine.”

Realistically, if he’s this bored after two weeks, he’ll be crawling up the walls if he tries to stretch it out until he’s twelve. He can see why actual children find the Academy challenging, but he hasn’t been an actual child in over twenty years.

They send him through a series of tests that he suspects is the graduation test, just without the ninjutsu aspect. He takes a written test on history, mathematics, and psychology. He throws shuriken, kunai, and senbon. He loses horribly in a supervised spar against one of the chuunin. 

And at the end of the day, his mother takes him out for sweets, carrying him home when he nearly faceplants onto the table.

[*]

“We’ve decided it would be in Takushi’s best professional interest for him to move up a class, and take half days at the Academy,” the Academy Head says.

( _’We’ve decided,’_ plays in Takushi’s head, _’my best interest.’_ It could be funny-- if he wasn’t so likely to be institutionalized should they find out why he’s a ‘genius’.)

“He’s already at genin-level in most of the theory classes we teach, and I’m sure he’ll pick up the rest in the next few years.” The Head leans back in her chair. “He could use work in the physical arts, which is why I want him to be on half days.”

“If he were moving towards a combat specialty, I would suggest only a few days a week,” the Head goes on, “but for espionage-focused students, it’s more important that their peers become familiar with them.”

Akari nods. “Since they take team assignments less often.”

“Wait, you want me to be a spy?”

His mother rests one hand on the top of his head. “Not like the ones in the books. Performers usually stay in the Land of Fire, and perform for nobles.”

Takushi hasn’t thought much about what specialty he’ll have as a genin. Having both Senju and Uzumaki blood will give him ridiculous chakra stores if his cousins are anything to go by, and wind is one of those elements where a little goes a long way. It isn’t unreasonable to think they’ll want him to be a ninjutsu specialist. At least, it _wasn’t_ unreasonable, he thought.

Being a spy isn’t something he’d considered. At all. Sure, with his adult-level intelligence he’d make an ideal child spy, but you wanted spies to blend in and not attract attention. He has two different colored eyes and _naturally blue hair_. In his last life, those would have been solved by contacts and hair dye, but any scent-type sensor could smell hair dye at a hundred paces, and Takushi isn’t entirely sure contact lenses have been invented yet.

Being a performer, though, is so obvious he can’t believe he didn’t think of it sooner. He’s known that kunoichi in his last life posed as performers, he just… hadn’t quite connected that to this life. Or himself. As he is definitely not a kunoichi.

Then again, it’s not like ninja particularly enforce gender norms. Exhibit A: Orochimaru. With Naruto and Konohamaru as future Exhibits B & C.

“If you need time to think it over—” The Head starts.

Takushi shakes his head. “No. I’ll do it.”

It isn’t exactly what he thought he’d be doing when he figured out where he was, but it’s better than a lot of things he could have ended up doing.

Arrangements are arranged, and Takushi goes from bored out of his mind for eight hours a day, to sore and blistered for half the day, then working directly under tutors for the other half.

It’s good enough.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for frank discussion of sex work. 
> 
> Also, a wonderful human made a Ways To Disappear moodboard! Check that out [here](https://definitelynotaminion.tumblr.com/post/190193082638/moodboard-for-fallintolifes-ways-to-disappear).

“Wakana-oba-san,” Takushi tilts his head over at his auntie. “Can you teach me how to do eyeliner?”

Wakana giggles, and sits him down in the chair next to her. She begins to lecture in a way that is no less exact for being delivered in sing-song. 

He pays close attention as she outlines his eyes, and closer still when she starts talking about using makeup to emphasize - or soften - his cheekbones and jaw. He knew from his last life that shadowing can make someone look more masculine (or less), he just never learned the skill.

“I hear you’re to be a spy, Takushi-chan,” Wakana says, putting the finishing touches on his eye makeup.

Takushi nods. “A performer.”

Wakana hums, then sits across from him. “And how does that make you feel?”

For a moment, Takushi just looks at her. Blonde hair, dark purple eyes, hair and makeup always flawless. All his aunties are social enough to help raise a child they didn’t birth, but Wakana is one of few who has close friends outside the clan. And she’s asking how something makes him feel. Hmm.

“I was born a Yamanaka,” she says, tilting her head playfully, “so I’ll know if you’re lying.”

“Because you’ll Mind-Walk me?”

He should be worried about it. Even under the best-case scenario Mind-Walk, it’s game over for him. If she comes across something she can’t verify, he’ll look crazy. If she finds something she can verify that he shouldn’t know, he’ll be in a great deal of trouble. Somehow he just can’t bring himself to care a whole lot. There’s nothing he can do to prevent it that he isn’t already doing.

She giggles. “No, because I’m very good at my job.”

“Are you my shrink?”

Wakana nods. “I can be. Or you could pick someone else, if you’re not comfortable with me.”

Takushi isn’t going to be comfortable with anyone, at any time, being his shrink. He gets the feeling this isn’t optional, though, and he can’t really blame them. Child geniuses are fragile, and he might not be a genuine one now, but he was in his last life. And, proving the point that he probably could have used a shrink at the age of six, he ended up a gigantic mess of a human being.

“Did you have one in your last life?”

“Sometimes.”

Takushi freezes, eyes slowly widening.

Wakana smiles, completely at ease. “Yes, I know you’re a reincarnated soul, Takushi-chan.”

There’s a whole lot to not unpack here.

“How?” He manages, feeling strangely betrayed. Takushi knows he can’t exactly be mad that his _ninja shrink_ tricked him, but… he’s mad that his ninja shrink tricked him.

“Reincarnation isn’t _common_ among Senju, but it’s common enough that when you were born with much more spiritual chakra than you should have, they knew to find a Yamanaka trained to deal with displacement.”

Which makes perfect sense considering the whole transmigration thing, and he can’t believe he didn’t think of it sooner. Madara and Hashirama may be the most recent transmigrants, but they’re not even the only ones in the same century. And of course the Senju don’t know that it can only be people who have the original transmigrant souls, they just know that sometimes insanely strong prodigies are born with old souls. He’s not exactly an insanely strong prodigy, but having adult-level intelligence isn’t anything to sniff at.

“It’s strange that you remember things from your last life, but that isn’t unheard of either.” She props her elbows up on the table, pillowing her cheek on her folded hands. “I knew what I was getting into when I joined Akari’s cell, honey.”

“Who else knows?” Takushi asks.

Wakana smiles her approval. “Just me, Inoru - Yamanaka Clan Head - and Mito-sama.”

“Not the Hokage?” Takushi asks, surprised.

Wakana shakes her head. “Do you want him to know?”

“No,” Takushi says immediately.

Takushi doesn’t trust Sarutobi Hiruzen as far as he can throw him. He doesn’t know when Hiruzen stopped being a worthy successor to Tobirama - if he ever was one - but he knows that some of the things Hiruzen has done are sketchy even for a ninja village. Even if he hasn’t yet founded a secret police (and then let a secret police _within_ the secret police operate), forgave his corrupt friend for multiple sins, and neglected the hell out of one of the most vulnerable members of his village… the potential for him to _turn into_ that man is there, and Takushi feels no obligation to trust him.

His auntie just smiles, and doesn’t comment.

“Not… my parents?”

Wakana shakes her head again. “This is considered strictly need-to-know. You can tell them if you want. All they know right now is that you were born with unbalanced chakra, and that it’s nothing to worry about.”

For a moment, Takushi just studies Wakana. She’s a woman who deliberately dresses to be underestimated, and he sure did at first. He never thought she was stupid, but he saw the way she dressed and acted, and assumed she was just a honeypot. He’s sure that better-trained people than he is have made that mistake, and kept making it.

“When they say ‘performer’, they don’t secretly mean sex work, do they?” Takushi asks, instead of addressing any of that. When she just looks at him, he goes on, “No disrespect meant to sex workers. I just want to know if this is the kind of place that will send an eight year-old to—”

“No, no, no,” Wakana interrupts before he can even finish his sentence. “To the best of my knowledge, neither Konoha as a village, nor the Senju as a clan, have ever sent someone on that kind of mission before the age of fourteen.”

He stares at her.

She gives him a wry smile. “If you’re surprised I have to put those qualifiers on it, you haven’t been paying attention.” 

Even after years spent as a citizen of Konohagakure, Takushi can’t stop himself from being horrified. Fourteen year-olds are children. They’re old enough to lie, cheat, steal, and murder by ninja standards, but to someone where the enlistment age was eighteen (and even that was too young), sending a fourteen year-old to have sex with strangers….

“It was Konoha who sent the fourteen year-old,” Wakana says, “though not because the Senju would hesitate. We’re just not exactly the clan you come to for seduction missions.”

Wakana herself proves that it isn’t an absolute rule, but there is a stereotype of Senju being battle-scarred veterans who only know how to make war. You send a Senju to kill in any one of a thousand ways, but not to do something subtly, or diplomatically. That would be the Yamanaka. Who had heavily intermarried into the Senju. Whoever was in charge of arranging marriages during the Warring Clans Period had been very, very good at their job.

“So are you done being suspicious?” Wakana teases, purple eyes much more alert than the playful tone implies.

“Never,” Takushi says wryly.

She smiles, acknowledging the point. “Enough for me to ask a few questions of my own? Oh, don’t give me that look. Of course I’m curious about your last life.”

Which answers a few of the questions rattling around in the back of his mind. If someone had done a deep Mind-Walk on him, she wouldn’t have questions. Right?

“So? Who were you? Boy, girl, other?”

“Other,” Takushi says, relaxing a little.

“Oooh,” Wakana waggles her eyebrows. “How did that work in your last life?”

Takushi spins her stories that are mostly truth, if carefully adjusted to a Hidden Village lens. It eases a weight he hadn’t known was there. He’s still well-aware that she’s a shrink, and his clansman, and she’s certainly reporting on him, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be friends too.

And gods, could he use a friend.


	7. it takes a village (to raise a killer)

Unlike in his first life, kunoichi here aren’t trained as something else first. They’re given supplemental training all through the Academy, and get heavy combat missions less often, but they aren’t expected to be spies first and killers second.

All of his aunties have kunoichi training, even those who don’t have a rank through Konoha. Sometimes it’s only a little (Kiyumi, who he suspects only knows enough to handle civilians and keep an eye out for trouble), and sometimes. Well.

“Come on, Takushi-kun,” Yuriko calls, “you have to work on your stamina!”

In his last life, Takushi had been one of those disgusting people who actually like running. In his last life, however, he’d had music on call, and could stop when he felt done. Now, even though he knows his auntie would let him stop, he’s acutely aware that running has become a survival skill. Spy or not, every single ninja needs to be able to exit a situation as quickly as possible.

Plus, his spiritual energy is way out of proportion to his physical energy. He needs to even things out if he wants to even think about using more advanced ninjutsu any time before his thirtieth birthday.

Sooner than he’d like, Takushi hits the very end of his stamina. He fights nausea as best he can, taking deep breaths in through his nose and out through his mouth. Yuriko nudges him to walk through the cool-down, and he huffs but walks with her.

She’s been doing literal cartwheels around him, and still going faster than he can at a dead sprint. He hopes that A, she’s one of his blood cousins so that B, he can do that someday, and that C, she trips over her own feet.

(He doesn’t really want her to fall, but he’s a spiteful little thing and what’s more he hates being in a child’s body. Wishing mild inconveniences on his aunt is the most harmless way he can get that out.)

“There you go,” Yuriko says, sitting down with him to drink water and finish cooling down, “you did great.”

With her cap of red hair and medium-brown skin, Takushi is pretty sure Yuriko was born Uzumaki before becoming Senju. As far as he can tell, she was a front-line combatant before she retired. He can’t tell why she retired. It sure isn’t because she can’t maneuver.

When he can finally breathe without wheezing, Yuriko takes him into her backyard. She walks him through the first discipline of her family style, hand-waving away his questions.

“If they didn’t want me to teach my adorable little cousin to use the meteor hammer, they shouldn’t have let me become a Senju,” Yuriko says, much more flippant than he thinks is entirely wise. He’s pretty sure she’s wrong, but for a ninja, a lack of consequences gets translated as permission.

And he’s not going to pass up learning to use one of the coolest weapons he’s ever seen.

Yuriko demonstrates the motions again and again, patiently talking him through it. There aren’t exact steps, unlike the other style he’s learning, just motions that have to be learned before moving on. He has enough body knowledge to pick up on the overall flow, but he has a long way to go with learning the more advanced motions.

Eventually he has to give his child’s body a rest, and he settles down with a snack to watch Yuriko move.

She weaves the meteor hammer over and across her body, sending the hammer flying with a twitch of a shoulder, a knee, her ankle. For a few minutes he suspects she’s using chakra to do some of the more gravity-defying strikes— and then he becomes of the exact moment she _is_ using chakra, and it takes his breath away.

The rope twists around her body like a living thing, hammer snaking out at unpredictable intervals. Yuriko flows into a back handspring while sending a strike out with unerring precision. She tucks herself into a backflip, rope wrapping around her neck and shooting back out in the middle of her flip. Yuriko stays airborne longer than any unenhanced human could ever hope to, still keeping complete control of her weapon the entire time.

When she lands, it’s into a perfect three-point stance that tells him she’s showing off.

“Can you do the chakra chains?” Takushi asks, finishing off his canteen.

Yuriko flips her wrist, recalling the meteor hammer so it wraps around her forearm.

“Someone been telling tales, little cousin?” She asks, tilting her head. 

He didn’t know the chakra chains were supposed to be a secret. From what he remembers, Kushina never acted like they were. Then again, he only really remembers her using them under extreme duress, so maybe he just missed the subtext the first time around.

Takushi shrugs. Even if someone had told him in this life, he’s not a snitch. He’s Uzumaki-blooded himself; he could have chains. Maybe somebody decided he needed to know.

“Yes, I can use the Uzumaki Chakra Chains,” she says, crouching in front of him. “And if you ever get them, you need to tell an Uzumaki right away, okay? Some chains can do things that only an Uzumaki can help you figure out.”

It’s not that he doubts her, it’s that he doesn’t know if there will be any Uzumaki around to teach him if he does get chains. His present-day is still forty years away from Naruto becoming a genin, but when that happened he was the only known Uzumaki in the village.

(And there weren’t _any_ Senju in the village. Not a one.)

“I will,” he promises, assuming she’ll forgive him if there aren’t any Uzumaki to tell.

Not that he thinks he’ll survive if they don’t, but he’s allowed to hope.

If his mother notices that he comes home a lot quieter than he left, she doesn’t say a word.


	8. culinary healing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now we officially meet the last of the Badass Auntie Squad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating update. This chapter doesn't call for it, but the last two probably did.

The imminent extinction of Clan Senju is something Takushi has been pretty successfully ignoring.

Unlike most of the other tragedies coming to Konoha, he doesn’t know how this one happened. Will happen. It’s not the Uchiha Massacre, where he knows what went on even if he has no idea how he’d stop it, neither is it Madara’s attack on Konoha by way of the Nine-Tailed Fox, where he knows how to prevent it but doesn’t know how he’d convince the principal actors to do so.

As far as he knows, no one even acknowledged that the Senju went extinct. He knows firsthand that Tsunade has the Senju name, but she’s never referred to that way in the story he read. The clan that Takushi knows is large, vibrant, and willing to fight to the last for any of its members. They have a long, storied history… that he never heard anything about in the story from his last life. Not beyond the Hashirama bits, and a few choice morsels about Tobirama.

There’s a difference between knowing intellectually that there will be two wars and two massacres between now and Naruto’s time, and having the devastating certainty that none of the people around him are fated to live out the next forty years. If _Takushi_ lives that long, it will just be him and Tsunade. Who he’s only met in passing so far.

And there’s nothing he can do about it, because _he doesn’t know what happened_.

If Takushi weren’t physically six, he’d be drinking about it. As he is in fact physically six years old, he doesn’t think anyone can blame him for thinking about anything but his imminent extinction.

He ends up spending a lot of early evenings with Kiyumi. She has a gaggle of her own children, but they’re at an age where they see Takushi as a “baby”, and he’s content to ignore them and be ignored. All Kiyumi asks from him is that he helps with dinner if he’s going to stay to eat, and he finds that her quiet companionship is exactly what he needs sometimes.

It helps that she’s a really, really good cook.

Takushi couldn’t cook worth a damn in his last life. He knew how to microwave potatoes, make brownies from a box, and reheat soup. In this one, he’s rapidly learning what Kiyumi judges to be staples, along with a few indulgences like almond cookies.

“Here,” she murmurs, after a few months of him just showing up at her house sometimes.

Takushi takes the small container. It’s a thin glass cylinder the length of his child-sized palm, and filled with… salt?

“Field ninja bring their own spices,” Kiyumi says, with all the calm he’s come to expect from her. “Some of them get exotic, but I find nothing is better than a bit of salt. It doesn’t expire or go stale, either.”

Takushi tilts his head at her. He never thought she was a field kind of ninja. She doesn’t have any callouses that he’s felt from when she’s guided his hands, and she definitely doesn’t have the kind of reflexes he associates with active-duty ninja.

“I’m a diplomat,” Kiyumi says simply. “We may be feasted when we reach our destinations, but we camp like everyone else along the way. I’ve never regretted bringing salt with me.”

He never thought about diplomat-ninja before. Logically they should exist but, well. He’s in a world where physics are loose guidelines, and the world’s superpowers are led by walking weapons of mass destruction. Logic doesn’t always reign here.

“Where have you been?” He asks, pocketing the container of salt.

“I was in Kumogakure at the end of the Great War,” Kiyumi says, pulling a plate out of the cabinet and getting out a knife. “They were very reluctant to come to the table.”

He watches her cut up pear slices, plating the slices and setting the plate between the two of them, all the while keeping up her explanation of the delicate internal politics of Kumo. Takushi learns more about Kumo in an hour than he has from any tutor or chuunin-sensei before this.

“I’m sure a boy your age doesn’t want to hear much more about that,” she says finally, when the plate is long-since empty, and Takushi’s head is spinning with new information.

“It’s interesting,” he says truthfully. “You know people really well.”

She gives him a sad smile. “People - even ninja - will always tell you who they are. You just have to pay attention when they do.”

Takushi thinks about her words long into the night.


	9. beneath the beneath of the beneath of the--

“You’re forcing it.”

Takushi groans, flopping face-down on the table.

“You’re glaring,” Wakana says, filing her nails, “you want it to look effortless.”

He grumbles something even he can’t hear, huffing. Then, he turns to look imploringly at his other auntie.

Without looking up from her mending, Ichino says, “Think about murder.”

Takushi wonders if she’d be this matter-of-fact with a true child, or if his aunties have just been adapting to the age he acts. Between the child-soldier culture of ninja, and the simple fact that there are no other Senju children his age, it’s impossible for him to be sure. The Academy chuunin-sensei bluntly answer any questions they’re asked, but they don’t volunteer ‘think about murder’ when asked for tips on things. He’s not exactly asking them how to establish a solid bitchface, but still.

Takushi spends some time thinking about murder, settling his face into the lines that he knows he’ll need as a professional killer. They’re shaping him to be a spy, but having a good bitchface is a survival skill even then.

Eventually he gives up, flopping face-first onto the table again.

“Weak,” Ichino says. He knows she’s teasing, but he still grumbles.

“I’d like to see you do it.”

Takushi knows the words are a mistake the second they leave his mouth. He knows this. But he’s not prepared for Ichino to stab her mending needle into the bundle of cloth and walk towards the table where Wakana sits filing her nails.

Wakana looks up, immediately interested, and a sly smile crosses her face when Ichino takes a seat.

Ichino reaches up to take the senbon out of her hair, finger-combing it into artful messiness. She slides both legs out to the side, anchoring herself on her other palm and tossing her hair over the opposite shoulder. Her face becomes mobile, moving into lines that Takushi associates much more with Wakana than Ichino.

Then she giggles.

Takushi’s eyes goes wide.

Ichino leans forward, moving her hand so she can rest her cheek on her palm. Her hair swings with the motion, artfully covering a scar on that side of her neck. Her eyes flick down to Wakana’s hands as if just now noticing them, and she lets out an overdramatic gasp.

“Oh I _love_ the color on your nails!”

It’s so bubbly it’s effervescent. His stone-faced auntie, the woman he (internally) rates ‘most likely to kill a man without breaking stride or changing expressions’, is having what sounds like a very knowledgeable discussion about shinobi-grade nail polish and the different shades it comes in. There’s a hint of ‘and this is how you best get the blood out from under your nails’, but even that isn’t enough to offset the fact that this is _Ichino_.

His horror only grows when he realizes that Ichino and Wakana are drifting closer and closer. Ichino takes Wakana’s hand, gushing about her bone structure. Wakana giggles and leans in until their faces are so close he’d think it was obscene in public.

Intellectually he knows his alarm is entirely his own fault. He knows that one, they’re just proving a point, two, they’re not blood related in the slightest so this isn’t as weird as he’s making it internally, and three, Ichino at least is monogamous and would never cheat on her husband.

Still, he can’t help wheezing out a breath when Ichino finally leans back and retrieves her mending, and Wakana goes back to filing her nails.

“This is my home face,” Ichino says, picking back up her mending needle and the shirt she had been working on. “It is not my only face.”

“We all have home faces,” Wakana says, blowing on her nails to remove imaginary dust. “You’ll find yours.”

Takushi’s reflexive thought is that he already has one, but that isn’t quite true, is it? He had one, once upon a time. More than one. He had a home face, a work face, a friends face, a public transit face. And now he’s someone different. Someone new. He can construct whatever home face he wants.

He throws himself dramatically onto the floor near Wakana, then turns his face so it’s mushed up against her thigh. Being a child again gives him a great excuse to sate the touch-starved person he used to be.

Nobody seems to notice him cuddling her - he knows that they _have_ noticed, but ignoring something like this is the same as acceptance - so he enjoys the contact while he thinks.

Who is he now? Who does he want to be? It’s a big question, bigger still in a world where everyone is trained to read body language and motives. Being himself sounds like a terrible idea on the face of it, but who else would he be? Who else _should_ he be?

In the end, he turns onto his back, pulls out his flute, and starts to play.

It is an answer, in that it isn’t. Even choosing not to answer is a choice.


	10. for the love of self

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes: Warning for unethical non-monogamy. Not quite cheating as there was no expectation of monogamy, but the lack of communication is certainly unethical. Also a warning for unhealthy views on being transgender. For full details, skip to the end. Please take care of yourselves.

Takushi is pretty sure that Yuriko is the cousin of his that is sleeping with either eight or nine women who haven’t caught on to each other yet. The one his mother was talking to in metaphor, but he understood perfectly because he’s not an actual child.

Thing is, he only vaguely remembers the conversation, and he doesn’t remember the other voice very clearly. Really, he’s going based on how he knows she’s his blood cousin, and the way she flirts with anyone above the age of seventeen who identifies as female.

Anyone.

Currently, it’s a woman he’s pretty sure is old enough to be her mother, and possibly Takushi’s grandmother. It’s not as though he’s judging her for her tastes, he just doesn’t think she’s told any of her women that they’re not the only one in her life.

“Another one for your stable?” Takushi asks sourly. He cares about Yuriko’s opinion exactly enough to only speak up when they’re out of earshot of the woman.

Yuriko gives him a sharp look. “We’re going to talk about that when we get back.”

Takushi doesn’t roll his eyes, but it’s a near thing. With her set in her ways, and also seeing him as a child, he knows this ‘talk’ won’t be productive.

They get back to her house, and she stops exactly long enough to set down her groceries on the counter before whirling on him.

“Who _tells_ you these things?” Yuriko demands, hands on her hips.

He glares up at her, resenting the height difference between them. “No one has to tell me things. I have ears.”

She lifts one hand to her face, pinching the bridge of her nose. Takushi knows that look, and he has no pity for her. It’s only _ethical_ non-monogamy if everyone involved knows and consents.

“Do you know why I started teaching you the meteor hammer?”

Takushi blinks. “Because I could have the Uzumaki chains?”

Yuriko shakes her head. “There’s a hundred Uzumaki-blooded kids running around this village. And it’s not because we’re cousins, either.”

Well. Now that he thinks about it, she has a point. The Senju spread their blood further, but there’s no shortage of Uzumaki-descended shinobi.

“So why…?”

Yuriko sighs. “I was born a man.”

It’s never far from Takushi’s mind that he was born, raised, and lived elsewhere for thirty years before coming here, but times like this it’s never more apparent. His birth certificate and his brain disagreed in his last life, and he was surrounded by people who were much the same. So while he’s sure Yuriko is expecting something like shock out of him, his actual reaction is to say:

“I wish that were me.”

He watches as his cousin’s eyebrow twitches. With how deadpan his tone was, she’s probably deciding if he was mocking her or not. He wasn’t, but there’s no convincing her of that.

“For a long time,” she says, instead of addressing that, “I lived that way. I was a drunk and a cheat— worse than most. It got to the point where I could let myself die, or I could see if being a woman would make me want to live.”

_’And I could always decide to die later,’_ Takushi fills in. He knows that feeling all too well.

“So when your mother told me what you said to Mito-sama….”

Takushi bites the inside of his cheek to stop from saying something he’ll regret. He knows perfectly well that he’s only on edge with her because of the way she’s treating the women she’s involved with. She’s never been anything short of good to him.

“They don’t let you out of the village if you have to take regular medication, like the ones I use to be a woman,” she says, bitterness clouding her words. “And I’m on leave until I work out my new center of gravity. So… this is what I do.”

‘This’ being teaching him. ‘This’ being sleeping with multiple women without informing them.

“And you didn’t want me to do what you do,” he assumes.

“Little cousin, _I_ don’t even want to do what I do,” she sighs.

There’s a lot he could say. He could say that testosterone injections can be scheduled so they’re once every two weeks, whereas oral estrogen supplements are daily and she’s tied to a pharmacy in a way he won’t be. He could say that just because she’s frustrated and restless, doesn’t mean she gets to risk other people. He could even say that he appreciates what she’s doing for him, because he does, and she could probably stand to hear it.

In his last life, he was socially awkward and only slowly teaching himself to express himself to the people closest to him, the ones he trusted completely. It would be so easy to fall back into old habits. She’s destined to die. Ninja are emotionally stunted. He’s a child and his words won’t mean much to her.

Takushi takes a deep breath and says, “I love you.”

Her face softens, and she reaches forward to rest a hand on top of his head. “I love you too.”

Then she takes him out back and runs him ragged doing stamina drills, but somehow he resists the urge to curse her name. She’s just trying to help him survive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End Notes: Yuriko implies that you have to take medication to truly be transgender. She is incorrect. If you feel you are, you are. Regardless of your presentation, your ability to ‘pass’, or what your hormonal balance is.


End file.
